Forget The Numbers

I should admit up front that, in 30 or more years of having
a chequing account, I have never had a properly balanced chequebook.
Numbers, columns, rows and totals all drive me crazy.

What I like most about Bill Murnighan’s piece is that it’s
forward-looking and balanced. We have the benefit of having
watched what’s happened
to the movement in places like the U.S. We have the luxury
of being able to learn from others’ mistakes and victories,
and
to move more deliberately. I’m especially impressed by Bill’s
resistance to the enthusiasm that’s so common today for the “everything
into organizing” approach. New members are good, but first
contracts are even better. And good first contracts mean satisfied
new members, who become great organizing contacts.

Bill’s piece has got an “organizing is not just about certification” tinge
to it. I’m an organizer. I guess you could say I certify people
for a living (no jokes please! I’ve heard them). But too many
of us see organizing as a process that’s political — one
that radicalizes workers — to the point where labour boards
say, “You can stop all that stuff and get structural: elect
a committee or two and start sitting down with the employer.” Bill
isn’t saying that. He doesn’t start out that way in his article,
and he doesn’t finish that way.

But, while Bill sees recruiting new members as part of a seamless
process of organizing workers in the broadest sense, he’s using
analytical tools and methodologies that I’m not sure still
hold. He’s talking numbers — quantifiable indicators of success
or failure in recruiting new members.

I think there’s a relationship between the way most of us think
about organizing as a process separate from the other things
we do in our unions, and the obsession we all have with measurements
of union density (the percentage of workers who are unionized
in a given area of employment).

I can see the need to conceptualize what organizers and activists
do, and how unions should be changing those things: we need
and want a way to figure out if what we’re doing is working.
But
there’s a problem inherent in this approach that we need to
think about. It’s an approach that follows a structure to labour
relations
that the labour movement didn’t ask for or determine on its
own. In fact, if I remember my labour history correctly, we
were headed
in another direction entirely: towards industry-wide unions,
not workplace-specific bargaining units. Then along came the
state and the employers.

We got stuck with a legal structure to labour relations that
evolved in the U.S. It wasn’t imported because it was American;
it migrated north because it had been proven to be useful and
workable — for employers and the State, not for workers.
The State, through labour legislation, tells us what we can bargain
for (or not), when we can bargain, and when we can and cannot
strike. The process is beyond structured: it’s straitjacketed.

Anyone who’s talked to a trade unionist from a country other
than the U.S. knows that the North American system of workplace
or enterprise-based bargaining units is far from the norm.
And if you look at places like Britain, which has recently
begun
to migrate towards the North American model, you’ll see that
the effects favour employers, not workers.

It’s not for nothing that staff who do what in Canada and the
U.S. would be considered largely servicing work, such as bargaining
with the employer and handling grievances, are called “organizers” in
Australia, among other places. There, and in most other advanced
capitalist countries, a union (or even more than one union) can
often represent workers in a workplace, or across an entire industry,
without having demonstrated majority support. Members work alongside
non-members, and the number of members — those who make
the effort to pay dues each month and who see the advantage of
supporting the union — may even be a small minority in
a workplace. So, in places like this, the strength of the union
is determined not just by the percentage of workers in an industry
(“union density”), but, more importantly, by the extent
to which the demands of the union have the support of the non-members
in the workplace.

It’s a very different system of labour relations and one that
doesn’t always lend itself to the numbers game. Instead, the
proof is in the pudding. Or the strike. Bill points out that
French unions have about nine per cent membership. That is,
about nine per cent of French workers pay dues to a trade union.
But
French unions can mobilize industry-wide strikes in the public
and private sector in which the vast majority of workers participate.

Think about that for second.

In Canada, we count bargaining units. Before we get to a bargaining
unit we count heads. Then we count cards. Then we count votes.

I’m a little leery of the numbers game we all tend to fall
into when looking at our successes and failures in “organizing.” Compare
our numbers with the French numbers. We have a bigger percentage.
They succeed in having a million or more workers (not all members)
strike over changes to the equivalent to CPP/QPP. Clearly there’s
something more at work than percentages.

I’m not saying we’re more or less militant; only that I think
we need to move outside the box of thinking in terms of bargaining
units and votes and certifications. More than anything, we
need to remember that the box wasn’t of our making. So throwing
it
away isn’t a betrayal of anyone or anything we hold dear.

A small example of how the box and the numbers mix: We measure
our success in terms of the percentage of eligible workers
who choose to join a union. But we don’t define who’s eligible.
The
government(s), largely at the behest of employers, do. Presumably,
the day the Ontario government took the right to organize away
from agricultural workers, the percentage of organized workers
in Ontario actually went up.

Huh?

I get even more confused by the numbers and what they mean
when I look at what our sisters and brothers are doing in countries
like India, Argentina, Zimbabwe, and in the unofficial unions
of China. Some of the most vibrant unions I know of don’t have
a single member in the Canadian sense of the term. They have
no formal structure, and collect dues on a pay-what-you-can
basis.
All they may have are contracts (sometimes not even that, just
an unwritten understanding between the workers and the employers),
and a wildly active — well, not membership exactly, but — well,
a bunch of workers who get together to do things for themselves.

In the South, workers often strike over social rather than
simply econ-omic issues, including issues like the privatization
of
water, or reductions in old age pensions. And they strike against
systems. These un-ions, and their members, are less likely
to be minor partners in political parties and more likely to
dominate
those parties (and the policies they put forward), or to act
as a political party themselves.

In some ways our labour movement is starting to look and (to
a lesser extent) work outside the box. Many of us have already
recognized that political parties aren’t the be-all and end-all
for political action. Our (initially) younger members and,
more importantly, those in sectors where they’re not likely
to become
members in the short term, are turning away from established
parties, including the NDP, and playing a new game. They talk
about “affinity groups,” not riding associations. They
don’t play electoral numbers games. They act outside the boxes
the State and political traditions created for us. They’ve forged
a whole new set of tools and are probably responsible for the
fact that just about anyone with a TV or a radio has a working
definition of the word “globalization.”

I can’t say I have any answers, nor even many of the questions.
But the best starting point for any re-thinking of what we
do and how we do it is to throw out all our assumptions and
see
if we can’t generate an ongoing debate.

Let’s start with tossing the numbers. If nothing else, it’s
a lot more fun to fight over ideas and concepts than percentages
and totals. And, in the end, it’ll take us a lot further, too.

Bill touches on one of those concepts, but skirts it a bit
as well.

Centralizing bargaining, negotiating neutrality agreements,
and many of the other ideas Bill presents all work, but only
when
the workers in those fragmented workplaces have some structural
solidarity in the form of one union. Does it really make sense
to keep reconstituting councils of unions (bringing several
unions together to bargain, as one, with an employer) when
what the
workers really need is one union? Does union density of more
than 50 per cent in an industry mean anything if that density
is spread among five or 10 or 20 unions? With that many unions
representing one employer’s workers, can any one union negotiate
a neutrality agreement? How effective is a council of unions
when each union has a significantly different organizational
culture and resource base?

Does union density mean much if we don’t or can’t do anything
with it?